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Brett Kahr's book D. W. Winnicott: A Biographical Portrait is, by the author's own admission, a sketch. It is an annotated book of facts and details concerning the life of Donald Winnicott. As such, it leaves the reader hanging-we want to know more. For those students perhaps only just beginning to encounter the work of Winnicott, the book does serve to give quite extensive factual background information as to what Winnicott achieved, when and how he achieved it, as well as a clear picture of the psychoanalytic climate at the time. But it begs many questions. Brett Kahr is currently working on a fuller biography which may or may not go some way towards answering some of the many questions that the book provokes.
It has to be asked why the author decided to publish this book when by the very nature of it being a sketch it is unsatisfactory. Sketches are all very well but rarely do they satisfy us, we want a fuller picture. There is of course the odd rare exception where a biographical sketch goes far enough to convey something of the essence of the man: Norman Malcolm's book on Wittgenstein, for example. It is, however, clear from this book that Brett Kahr has enormous respect and admiration for this complex, modest man. It is lovingly written though he can sometimes be rather formal in his use of language. He keeps himself rigidly to the facts and very rarely dares to conjecture.
Biographies are strange affairs. We read them not only because we like reading stories but because we are curious. A biography should seek to give us a fuller, more tangible picture of a person by linking the outer events of life with the more complex, inner world. Writing a biography sets the author on a trail of detective work, finding out the facts, then linking them together with intuition and imagination-putting flesh on the bones so to speak.
For those of us engaged in a serious and sustained study of the work of D.W. Winnicott this book has little to offer. Much of the information it co